Lessons from the Pandemic: What Have We Learned About Instructional Design?
Dr. Gerald Ardito
Associate Professor of Science & Computer Science Education
What Are We Up To?
- What lessons can we take away from pandemic teaching/teaching during the pandemic?
- What can this unique time teach us about instructional design?
- What are the connections between instructional design, student engagement, and learning outcomes?
Prologue: Default Models - Emergency

Prologue: Default Models - Face to Face Classrooms

Teaching Presence
Teaching Presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).
Cognitive Presence
Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse. (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001).
Social Presence
Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.” (Garrison, 2009, p. 352).
The Magic is in the Connections/Intersections

Conceptual Framework

Research Questions
- What patterns of connections and interaction emerge between students and their instructor in an open world game type of instructional design?
- How are these connections and patterns of interactions the same and/or different than patterns of connections and interactions between students and their instructor in a more traditional type of instructional design?
The Context
- 14 teachers/teacher candidates in a course entitled “CS for Teachers”
- Conducted in a social learning platform built with Elgg software
- Spring 2016 semester
- Instructional design shaped by Arnab, et al. taxonomy
Taxonomy of Game Design Elements/Autonomy

The Methods
- Students participate in the course via a series of units focused on the history of CS in K-12 schools, core research, and coding via robotics.
- While they worked in this asynchronous course, they were able to interact with the teacher and one another.
- Those interactions were extracted and analyzed.
Data Analysis, part 1
- Social Network Analysis (SNA) - to visualize student networks for each learning activity
- Every interactions was coded (codebook to follow)
- Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) was used to visualize the epistemic space of each learning activity.
Data Analysis, part 2/Codebook

Findings - SNA, part 1/Reflection

Findings - SNA, part 2/Learning Logs

Social Presence
Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.” (Garrison, 2009, p. 352).